All That Will Be Left Is Us

My thumb hurts. It was recently that I discovered this, but I feel it may have been this way for some time. Obviously, I do not know why it is. I may try to figure it out, but I may not as well. For isn't a bit of mystery good for us? Even if it's just something simple like a minor, unexplained pain. Sure, it could be uncomfortable (pain, specifically), but I at least like not knowing some things. The larger the scale, the more intriguing I find it, and the more drawn I am.

I suppose this may be why death so fascinates mankind. An eternity of darkness, pain, light, joy, nothingness, fulfillment, sadness, what have you. It is the ultimate unknown, and it comes to each of us as it wills. Some find their solace in religion, others in science, others in nothing. But when we reach the end, each and every one of us, we tremble. We are shaken by the magnitude of what is about to happen, we revel in the ending of these days, we cry out for something. Whether those things be in fear, elation, or vain, is up to you.

Falling, Falling, Falling

Three days in a row? This is getting stupid (and by this I mean I, and by is I mean am).

Yesterday was a day of people. First, my partner for my oral exam and I went to the EMU to practice. We ended up just talking for a good hour and a half, and of course getting no practice in. We left the EMU and went to Hunky Dory, a smokeshop on 7th and Lincoln, where I bought a pipe and some White Burley tobacco. It smells like vanilla. And tobacco.

Later, after we had parted ways and gone to our respective homes, Jaime called me and I had dinner with him and two of his friends, James and Blake. That's probably the most offensive I've been in quite some time. Jaime made couscous, palenta, and a salad. All were, as per usual, quite good. Blake messed around with the settings on Jaime's keyboard, and found one with an inordinate amount of sexual moaning. At this point, he decided that he would use this setting to create an audio porno. He was wished luck by none.

Gone Away Again

I should really get back on the ball. This has been two days in a row I'm late. Now sure, you could point out the fact that not only is my readership minute, but that I don't really say much with these things anyway. But I made a goal dammit. A goal to write minimum of one blog a day until the end of the year, and I plan to stick to it.

Apparently in the morning yesterday I missed Chris by just fifteen minutes. I wake up at 7:15, so doing the very easy math brings it to Chris having gone to sleep at 7:00. That boy should really get on a normal sleep schedule, or at least a less abnormal one. Like mine. Now granted, I've been staying up until roughly 1:00 or 2:00 every morning and getting up at, as earlier mentioned, 7:15, but did you know that recently a genetic mutation was discovered in some people that makes it so that they require only six hours of sleep as opposed to the standard eight?

I doubt I have that mutation.

It Asked For Wrinklefish

I got two things yesterday. First was my electric bill, which came to $37.92, a good $3 under the average. The second was my signed first edition copy of Only Revolutions, Danielewski's sophomore effort. Yes, I know there's no reason to own that. But guess what? I do anyway. So HA.

Something that I very much recommend everyone do at some point is watch TV while listening to classical music. Last night we watched Dirty Jobs and an episode of Nova while listening to Four Seasons, and a while it back it was a show about Woodstock with Serenade For Strings. Things will match up, and it is far too much fun.

Also speaking of getting new things, my partner for the oral exam in french keeps changing. Not through any thought on the part of my partners, but the fact that my teacher keeps changing the groups. I think it's solid now though. Apparently we will be having an oral exam every Friday until the end of the term.

Yes, this is late. Speaking of late things, I should get going. My bus gets here pretty soon.

Devoirs Pour Demain

I woke up at 9:30 today. That's bad on Mondays. Also Wednesdays and Fridays. Any guesses why? No? Wow, really riveted crowd I've got here. It's because I have class at 9:00. My general wake up time is 7:30, which gives me adequate time to rise, bathe, sate, walk, and wait. The point here is that I missed writing, which is indeed not a good thing. Missing philosophy (which is right after writing at 10:00) I could care less about. It really is a boring class. A philosophy class should never be lecture based; that defeats a portion of the point of the thing.

Moving on to 2:00 this afternoon, I arrived in french the usual minute before class begins. We got our scores for our oral exam, as well as our chapter tests back. As anticipated in a prior posting, I got a C on my test with 77%. On my oral exam, I got a 37.5 out of 40. For said exam, we were allowed to take in notes written in english. I was going to post a picture of them, but it was huge. Instead, I transcribe them:

Hi!
Hi!
Name?
Name! Yours?
Name! How are you?
Good! You?
Good! Student?
Student! You?
Student! Classes?
Classes!
Like them?
Maybe! You?
Maybe!
Portland?
Nope. You?
Yep!
Weekend activities?
Weekend activities!
Dance time! Bye!
Bye!

Myself, I had a good handle on everything we were saying. These were more for my partner, Chris Griffith (I call him (though not to his face) Kind Bearded Chris). I lost my 2.5 points for accidentally saying the past tense form of something. Damnable past, ruining everything.

The Daily Grind

So this is day one of week two for the blog. Awwwwwww. Today also marks the end of the third week since either Chris or I have bought groceries. Thank you non-perishable foodstuffs. Still, this is pushing it. We might get some today. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe we'll see how it goes going an entire month with a near empty refrigerator. It's up in the air for us.

I found a really nice water bottle in my French class a couple of weeks back. It's one of those metal ones. I washed it out and now use it quite often. These sentences have been very curt and clipped. I just stopped blogging to drink out of it, but it was empty so I just tossed it up in the air a few times. I am now back, typing incessantly and with inanity. Just here I had a brief conversation with Chris about how Five Mins. of Heaven was really bad and how Taken, while not really a good movie, was awesome. Action movies don't need to be good anyway. They just need to be action-y. The link between the two, if you're unaware of the prior, is that they both star Liam Neeson. Yeeeeeaaaahhhhhh. I'm not really going anywhere with this, maybe even less so than usual. I'll stop now.

That's The Devil Leaving Your Body

I'm throwing up a lot lately. Like, this past month has accounted for 25% of my vomiting experiences since freshman year of high school. This latest time, being last night, Chris, Jaime, Kevin and I were walking around Fox Hollow, smoking cigars. At some point I remembered that I had yet to regale Kevin with how my left arm is shorter than my right, so I began to do so. When it came to the point in the story to show him, I put my cigar in my mouth and did so. At this time, however, I somehow managed to take a full breath of cigar. Now, if you've not had any experience with cigars, let me tell you now that they're very strong in general. This one was particularly strong. Also, inhaling a relatively substantial amount of cigar smoke will make you vomit. Fast forward to twenty minutes later, and I was laying on the floor of Jaime's apartment. Another five minutes and I was in his bathroom, vomiting the decidedly mediocre risotto Kevin had made. It's fine for me to say that, as he himself said it was decidedly mediocre. Even if he hadn't it would still be okay. God, get off my back. I can say what I want. At this point, we decided to go see Where The Wild Things Are, a very very odd movie to say little. On the way, though, we had to make two stops: one for gas, one for, you guessed it, more vomiting! But you always feel so much better after the fact, yeah? That's always nice at least.

Screw You, Juno MacGuff

I recently gave a friend a Lee Ranaldo solo album, the reaction to which being "This is awful. It's just noise." This wasn't an unsolicited offering, mind you. But it got me to thinking. I'm sure this person had some kind of expectation for the album, an expectation that was quite clearly unfulfilled. What it got me thinking was that the reason I like things like that is because I'm interested in both the creation of music and its destruction. Look at a lot of my favorite artists as well. What do a majority of them have in common? They were revolutionaries of their craft. But going back, the reason I like the destruction, or maybe deconstruction, of music, is because it sheds far more light on to what goes into its creation than the actual creation itself.

To each their own, and the judgement of others.

(She's So) Boring

So I'm behind again. No class today except for French, and it being post-test, I hoped it would be low-key since I'm a bit behind. But lo! It was not. We went over family members and days of the week. I've no idea how those are possibly related, but so are the ways of learning languages. On the way to said class, there was a guido to my left, something best described as Tom Arnold to my right, and a woman who smelled chokingly of chili. My god, the chili. Blue Oyster Cult couldn't stop me from being throttled by this woman's stench. No, I don't know how to get an umlaut on here, and I'm not going to take the time to figure it out. I don't know how she left her home thinking that that was an acceptable way for anyone to smell. It is baffling. It is pointless to ponder on. It was murderous, most foul, malodorous, she was maladroit. I've spent this large portion of this posting railing on about this cretin's stink because it doesn't leave my nostrils. I've taken two showers and it's still there. I'd compare it to how when someone is forced to kill a loved one, every time afterward they close their eyes, they see the pleading, begging, bloodied face of this person of great importance to them as their life is poured out on to the floorboads of that rickety old ship that hosted their first fishing trip together, way back when.

Day Late, Change to Spare

So it seems I was very quickly derailed from my goal of one blog a day. However, I counter this with the fact that I was one blog ahead anyway, thus cancelling out my ineptitude. Also, Jaime showed up pretty much right when I got back from French, and we didn't part ways until pert' near 11:30. Speaking of French, we had a chapter test on modules 1 and 2. Yes, I realize that means nothing to anyone. I think it went pretty well. Definitely got a C, but I think I may have gotten a B. I know an A is out of the question because I didn't know anything beforehand about the Sorbonne. I do now.

So Jaime picked us up and we went back to his house, at which point he made minestrone, palenta, and a salad, alongside which was served rosemary foccaccia bread that he had also made. Jaime's a really good cook. Post-meal activities included listening to anarchist essays, engaging in discourse about the government and what it can do and already has done that will eventually (Jaime says in the next five years) put us under martial law, discussing revolution, arguing about the fate of neanderthals, my hope to one day own Bouvet Island, Twitch's plan to build and authentically man a pirate ship, agreeing that capitalism is a terrible system, messed around with Rosetta Stone, 'n' sitch. Jaime gave Chris some material to read that I shall be partaking of as well.

At this point (roughly 10:00) we went to Market of Choice and bought gelato. We then came to our apartment, ate said gelato, spoke more on some prior touched on subjects, and then I checked the mail. There was a cat sitting by the laundry room. When I walked by on my way to the mail, it hated me. On my return trip, it was freakishly affectionate. I gave it some attention, but on my way to return to my home it began meowing pitifully as cats do so well. Even so, I left it be. Chris and I both gave Jaime material to read at this point (Doors of Perception and Shutter Island from Chris, Unabomber Manifesto from me), and parted ways. Chris and I sat around and didn't do much after that. Then I went to sleep.

A-Walk Walk Walkin'

Today I had a conference with my Writing 122 teacher. She set up conferences with each student, something put a little further into the front of my brain by the fact that I forgot we had no class on Monday and showed up to find an empty classroom and another student who had done the same. We both made what could be called in circles with different standards jokes. Rather, we more laughed awkwardly at passed statements as we quickly went our separate ways, I being nothing like his sporty regulars. Nice guy though. I went and waited for the 79x to make its loop and return me home. I was listening, I believe, to Audrye Sessions' first album, Braille. Their eponymous album certainly has more poppy staying power and catchiness, but Braille is definitely better. The Crows Came In and All I Need? Go home, Turn Me Off and Awake. I also wrote while waiting. People were very clearly reading what I was writing, so I began to rail against minorities something fierce. They stopped reading at that point, except for one guy that just kept nodding. Then I wrote a poem, and he stopped looking too. The bus showed up, I got on, waited, got off one stop early just because, walked home, came inside, sat down, and did something.

Today, I missed the bus that would've had me a good twenty minutes early for my conference, so I had to wait for the 10:54 79x. Now my conference was at 11:20, and it's roughly an eight minute bus ride, so I should've been fine. But no. This guy took seven minutes to make the three minute loop of the apartment complexes, putting things at 11:01. Then he somehow managed to take five minutes to make the one minute trip from the last stop to the bridge, putting us at 11:06. The only reason I can list his times with relative accuracy is because I was listening to Beck's Guero, an album I have mostly memorized both lyrically and length-wise. Around this point, I realized I would be late and apologies and explanations (read: excuses) would be in order. But maybe I'd be lucky and something similar would havve happened to someone ahead of me, so that things would be backed up and I'd be on time. Sure, it was a pipe dream, but I had that dream anyway. We finally arrived at UO station at an inexplicable 11:27, at which point I rapidly got off of the bus and began to walk toward my classroom. It was about two minutes into the campus that I realized these conferences would not be held in our classroom, but in my teacher's office. It was also at this point that I realized that I have no idea where her office is. My blinding failures in logic and transit colliding, I walked back to UO station to wait for the 79x to return and return me to my place of residence. I moved on to Midnite Vultures when Guero was finished. Gotta love Nicotine & Gravy. I do, that is.

Initiation

Choosing a layout for this easily took me the longest time it has for anything I've had to choose a layout for prior. I have no idea why. It wasn't because I wanted the right atmosphere or anything. I guess it just took me a long time because it did.

I have four candle stands and candles in two of those. You'd think in a college town like Eugene, with a marketplace specifically geared towards yuppie women, that candles would be easy to find, though not cheaply. Yet it seems that is in fact not the case. I suppose I could try the thrift stores, but thrift candles are dicey.

Speaking of thrift stores, Value Village had some definite gems. I found three fancy looking books: Amaranth Press Treasury of Great Short Stories, Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm, and the National Geographic Book of Dogs. Now sure, the last one seems a bit strange of a choice, but you should see this book. It was way too nice looking to pass up. Plus hardbound books are only $3.

Thus, I make my first posting.